Scorpio Ablaze

by Alan Burt Akers

  He said: “Lahal, Dray.”

  I stopped and remained silent, staring at him in the Moons’ glow.

  “There is not much time. Can you fly right away?”

  “Of course, Deb-Lu. Where and what has happened?”

  Rollo’s voice changed from his own to the friendly wheezy tones of Deb-Lu-Quienyin. Deb-Lu was dwaburs away in Vallia, using his kharrna to project not his image but his vision and voice. As a most potent Wizard of Loh, Deb-Lu was a valued comrade. He spoke succinctly.

  “An airboat is down north of you, outskirts of Chem. Most unhealthy. When you near the exact spot I’ll guide you in.”

  “Right. A northerly course it is. Who’s aboard?”

  “Better ask me who isn’t aboard.”

  My heart both sank and rose. By Zair! It would be like them all, like her, like — Rollo said: “Deb-Lu has gone.”

  “Break camp. All aboard. We’re flying north!”

  Chapter five

  From Tarankar the west coast of Loh bulged out to the west in a great arc of coastline until, just south of the equator, it curved in again and then was drawn in a subtle sweep up to the northern point of the continent, the land of mountains and valleys, called Erthyrdrin, from whence hailed Seg. Chem sprawled all across the equator. There was no dividend for us in flying due north. We had no wish to tangle with the Fish Faces and their flying ships again. We could take the westerly route over the sea or the easterly over the desert. In deciding to go via the eastern route I was guided by a strong desire not to fall into the water if the bronze boxes failed. We took many pots of water, just in case we came down in the desert. Then we flew.

  Pouring on the power, ferociously impatient, I took the controls and willed the little tree trunk craft onward.

  People took one look at me and then kept out of my way.

  Of them all it was Fan-Si who came forward, diffidently, tail flicking over one shoulder and then the other, to request that I allow someone else to pilot and took my rest.

  That made sense, of course. The trouble is, when Delia is in danger, sense and I part company. I looked at the little Fristle fifi in a fashion that did not make her flinch back. Rather, I think she saw the dazed expression on my face and understood I was in the grip of a powerful emotion.

  “Rest?” I said, stupidly.

  “You’ll fall down, else — prince.”

  Mevancy hove up then, tight-lipped. She gave me a look.

  “Very well.” They were right, of course. I’d be of no use if we arrived in the middle of trouble and I kept falling asleep. “We will fly through the night. Rollo will have to take the controls then.”

  Now, mark this. We were supposed to be engaged in freeing Tarankar from the Schtarkins. We were to have flown to arrange the Day of Uprising, to contact Queen Kirsty’s army, to synchronize all the elements that should fuse to chuck the Fish Faces out. Yet no one questioned why we thus flew so madly north, away from Tarankar.

  Interestingly enough, and I didn’t believe it, with my brain whirling with fear and concern for Delia and the others, I slept. I closed my eyes and Mevancy was shaking my shoulder and saying: “It’s morning, cabbage.”

  I sat up, blinking.

  The truth of the matter was I’d been pushing myself too hard lately — although that is normal for me on Kregen, by Vox! Nature had done what she could to patch me up. I felt refreshed.

  Mevancy’s eyes were red.

  “Did you sleep, pigeon?”

  “A little. Over there—” and she pointed to the west “—is Sinnalix.”

  The early morning suns filled the sky with apple green and peach pink. The air breezed past like the bubbles in sparkling fresh spring water. This was a day to be up and doing, to be about great affairs on Kregen.

  “Sinnalix,” I said, deliberately repeating the name of her home country. “You are a kregoinya. I suppose the Everoinye wouldn’t mind if you made a trip home. When we’re done here.”

  “Oh, I’m not homesick, fambly!”

  “It’s no business of mine, then. Now, pigeon, breakfast!”

  As we roared on over the rolling grasslands below, the desert far astern, the jungles ahead, we ate the first breakfast. Toilet facilities were arranged behind a canvas screen, and I allowed only wetted cloths — there was no pouring of pots of water over anybody. Llodi, who had found himself a strangdja, kept guard on the water supply. Any sensible person looking at the strangdja and seeing that wicked steel holly-leaf-shaped head would decide not to attempt to steal more than their fair share of water.

  Something was bothering Mevancy.

  An unnatural calm had fallen on me. We were going as fast as we could. We would reach the downed voller when we did. Only then would I know the true gravity of the situation, for Deb-Lu, probably quite rightly, had not put in another appearance.

  Munching the last of my handful of palines and relishing the yellow berries as every single person of Kregen relishes them, I came across Mevancy sitting on the edge of the raft flier, her legs dangling overside. She was looking out to the west.

  I said: “If you fall off, cabbage, I shall not stop to pick you up.”

  “She means so much to you, then?”

  I was startled.

  Mevancy went on in a low voice: “The lady of whom you have spoken.”

  “Yes.”

  Mevancy lifted up her shoulders and let them slump. She had one arm wrapped around a rail support. If she let go and tried to do anything foolish I would stop and catch her first.

  The enormity of that thought suddenly made me feel insignificant. She’d thought she’d been in love with Leotes, and now she knew she had not been. I had the funny old thought that she and Kuong might make a go of it. Mevancy, although she had forearms covered with bindles with which she could destroy a man’s face, was a different form of apim. She was a sport, a mutation, peculiar to her country. Kuong was apim. The match would be a good one.

  Still, that was a subject I could not mention to her.

  When Deb-Lu showed up to guide us in he did so in a lupal projection. You could not see through his body. There was no blue nimbus about his figure or halo about his head. He stood on the tree trunks smiling at me in his old familiar way — and his damned turban toppled almost over one ear until he shoved it straight.

  “Jak! You have made good time.”

  He often called me Jak in remembrance of past and fraught times of mutual adventure. Also he knew my fad for aliases. Rollo came up and was most polite. A number of Kuong’s people tended to congregate as far away from the sorcerer as they could get. There was no undue muttering. The existence of mages is a mere matter of fact upon Kregen.

  Mevancy and Kuong stood silently at the side as I said: “Deb-Lu, perhaps you would be good enough to instruct Rollo in our course.”

  Rollo gave me a leery look. “You will allow me to fly?”

  “Carry on.”

  Giving them no more time to talk I went as far forward as I could and stretched out on a projecting trunk. I clung on as a monkey clings to his mother as they swing through the trees. I looked down.

  The trees were down there, all right. They were not brellam trees. The smells of the jungle wafting upwards in the hot air brought a spicy tickle to my nostrils. There was a sense of the whole body being bathed in exotic perfumes. The trees grew in great folds and swathes of ground, following the contours, and yet they did not form an unbroken canopy. Narrow watercourses threaded in what appeared haphazard directions and here the trees left the sky open. The ground was extremely stony, the streams being littered with boulders, and I guessed the topsoil lay only thinly over the rocks. The trees were not the incredibly tall giants of many of Kregen’s jungles; they might be shorter of stature, they formed a massive living organism in which animal life flourished.

  There was no need for that dramatic — and, if the truth be told, ostentatious — gesture on my part of going right forward so that I should be the first to spot the downed voller. We
fleeted in over the treetops as Rollo held her in sure control and there was a wide-spaced clearing ahead, ringed by trees, shooting into view as we cleared the last branches.

  The situation was at once plain and at once horrible.

  The voller was of a type I did not recognize. She was barely visible for the multitude of ropelike lines stretching from the encircling trees across her decks and upperworks. These web-like structures were white and sticky and as I stared down more lashed out from the tree tops to fasten about the vessel. They were trying to pull her up so the cruel spined flowers about the trunks could devour their prey. The voller lurched up and to the accompaniment of a gust of foul-stinking air and a belching sucking sound, sagged back to her former position. The grass all about the clearing was of a bright brilliant green.

  That ominous bright green lapped up all along the hull of the voller, like a thousand mouths trying to suck her down.

  Rollo called down: “I do not need to tell you what that is!”

  He’d saved us from one of these deadly shuckerchuns on our way south.

  I pulled myself back from that ungainly perch and stood up. I was not feeling happy. I was feeling rather as though I’d like to poke out the eyes of whatever devils had a hand in this infernal affair.

  “The shuckerchun is trying to pull the voller down. The trees are trying to pull her up. What are the damned things?”

  “They’re a kind of syatra,” responded Rollo at once. “Some change in their environment changed them, too. They’re called flitchlaks. They can whip a sticky tendril about you and whip you up to their flower in no time at all. Unholy things.”

  “The ground sucks down and the trees pull up,” said Kuong with a voice heavy with concern. “They are in balance.”

  “If we cut the lines,” observed Mevancy. “The voller will be sucked down.”

  Rollo swung our little craft in a circle about the clearing. Everybody looked down. Not a single sign of movement was visible on that tendril-infested vessel below.

  I said: “Deb-Lu — can you let them know—?”

  He nodded so that his turban almost tumbled off onto the floor of his chamber back home in Vallia. “Khe-Hi is already there, Jak. Just to hearten them, you understand.”

  As I turned back from the Wizard of Loh to stare sickly down at that frightful scene below, I caught a glimpse of Fan-Si creeping up to join the party in the bows. I heard her say in her sibilant Fristle whisper:

  “But what can we do?”

  The voller was held in suspension between the sucking shuckerchun and the lifting flitchlaks. The shuckerchun had evidently worked its way along under the ground. It moved slowly and the process would have taken a deal of time so that the trees had grown up again after their ancestors had been pulled under. My guess was that the shuckerchun was looking for a richer ground than that afforded by the thin topsoil and stony land here. As for the flitchlaks, perhaps they welcomed a clearing there, even a clearing which vied with them for food. I could imagine the race between the two to snare game wandering into the lethal clearing.

  But, as Fan-Si had said, what could we do?

  The first and obvious solution I had immediately discarded. The danger to the people aboard the flying raft was unacceptable. But as I struggled and twisted my brains for a better solution I kept coming back to the obvious. I always enjoy an elegant solution to a problem. If the people kept steady aboard the raft, their peril could be controlled to a level that was acceptable. The elegance came in using the lethality of the problem for its own solution.

  If I landed them somewhere nearby they might well be in as much peril, from flitchlaks, syatras, hungry reptiles or any of a hundred jungle dangers, as risking it with me aboard the flying raft. Anyway, I was in no mood to shilly-shally. I wanted this thing done, and done quickly.

  So, seeing nothing else for it, I made up my mind.

  “Llodi, Moggers, Larghos, Tuco — help me rip up these end timbers. Don’t cut the lines, we’ll need them to tie the trunks again.”

  With that I was off to the stern of the raft where I started in ripping up the end trunks. They stared at me somewhat blankly — only for a moment, though, by Krun! Only for a moment.

  “Get stuck into it, you lollygagging bunch of hulus! Bratch!”

  They jumped.

  Following my impatient lead they carried the released timbers to the bows where they were placed from the front rail slanting down to the deck. Other shorter timber was placed across the front, and enough of a gap was left for me to see through. In short order we’d built a sloping triangular shelter over the controls.

  “Now wrap those lines around. Tie ’em fast! That’s the style.”

  Rollo said: “I can fit in there nicely enough. But to what purpose?”

  I said: “You don’t fit. I do.”

  “But—”

  “You help to get everyone in the deck shelter and don’t let ’em out.”

  “I see!” He snapped it out at me. “It’s a crazy scheme! The flitchlaks will rip that flimsy shelter to pieces and snatch you out for lunch!”

  I wasn’t prepared to argue. I could have said the tendrils would not find it easy to get at me. If they did I happened to have a sword. All the same, elegant though my solution to the problem was, it remained a crazy scheme.

  Inevitably, as I knew and accepted with a resignation I tried not to make too hasty, I had trouble with Trylon Kuong.

  In his open, free way, he said: “I do not quite see what you seek to accomplish here. All the same, I shall stand with you.”

  Here was where the tomfoolery of being a prince paid off.

  I said: “Your offer is befitting your courage, trylon. However, I’m the prince here, and I’m the one to do the job.”

  His face showed genuine disappointment. “Of course, prince.”

  We were pulling the last lines tight around the lash-up of logs. Just what these damned flitchlaks could do or no I just didn’t know. Ominously enough, Rollo, who did know, kept up a gloomy, hurt silence. Mevancy looked nervous. “We can only take a few people at a time, cabbage. And while we’re waiting the tendrils will grab us.”

  “I want the tendrils to grab us. As many as possible.”

  “What?”

  “You keep your head inside the deck shelter. If a flitchlak’s tendril grabs your head it won’t remain between your shoulders.”

  “And, cabbage, what about yours?”

  There was nothing to say to that. Just before I squeezed into the tiny triangular space abaft the controls I wondered if I ought to have found a spot to dump these people down. I was running them into hideous danger. My mind was decided in a most unpleasant — not to say frightening — way by the movements of the voller down there in the clearing.

  The flitchlaks were bending over and all the time they had been bending further and further. They continued to shoot out fresh lines. The earlier ones were breaking under the strain. Whilst this scared me, it also heartened me, reinforcing the correctness of my decision. The balance we had at first discerned between sucking and pulling was now becoming an imbalance. Time had suddenly become vital.

  Speed, of course, had always been essential.

  If the confounded tendrils or tentacles or lianas fastened about the little flying raft before I’d conned her where I wanted her to be then the whole scheme would be in ruins. Into the bargain, we’d all be trapped.

  A single yell back: “Everybody inside?” and Kuong’s answering shout: “All in!” and I set myself. The controls felt slick and warm under my fingers. The air held a close mugginess in that confined space. There was one chance and one chance only. A single mistake and it’d be the Ice Floes of Sicce for us all, or, down here in Loh, the Death Jungles of Sichaz. I shoved the controls over to full speed and swung the little craft in a swinging sweep into the clearing.

  Instantly the snaking white lines hissed past. They crisscrossed in a dazzling pattern. I swung and swerved about, feeling the momentary checks on speed
as a line whipped across and held for an instant. Then the raft would lurch and the tendril snap and curl away and on we’d hurtle.

  Straight down for the stranded voller I plunged. The white mass of tendrils festooning decks and superstructure looked as though a giant chef had gone mad with an icing bag and piped in maniac abandon. A clotted solid mass of the things clothed the ship. I aimed for my target and jinked and sideslipped and so in a wind-rushing storm slapped down hard.

  The moment I touched the voller and sank some way into the clustered white tendrils line after line hissed past, wrapping the raft in a sticky cocoon.

  Almost at once all vision ahead was lost. Only a faint gray light seeped past the flitchlaks’ tentacles across the forward observation slit.

  There was no need to see. I could feel it all. The lash and thump across my fragile shelter, the way the raft jumped. I waited.

  I waited.

  By the stinking putrescent nostrils and dangling eyeballs of Makki Grodno! I waited.

  Apart from the thud of lines slamming across the logs I could feel the steady and deadly sinking beneath my feet. There was no doubt about it. The shuckerchun was winning the contest. Before long the voller would be sucked down, all the lines broken, and nothing would remain on the surface of Kregen of all my friends here.

  This was it. I could wait no longer. I was gambling, yes; but I was not gambling entirely blind. If the shuckerchun sucked the voller down far enough, dragged her deeply enough below the surface, my fine gamble might not pay off. Now was the time!

  Gently — oh, so gently! — I eased the control lever over.

  If I had miscalculated...

  At first, nothing happened. We did not rise. I moved the lever a fraction more. The raft lurched. I could feel the heavier touch to her, the sense of weight. Another fraction. We lifted. I could still see nothing ahead. A vast tearing ripping sound was followed at once by a slobbering sucking noise. A filthy stench gusted up.